French Lesson 7: Imperfect Tense - Partitive Article

The imperfect tense indicates that the action began in the past.

Formation

The imperfect tense is formed by adding the endings:

• -ais
• -ais
• -ait
• -ions
• -iez
• -aient

These endings are the same for all the verbs. The three singular persons and the third plural person sound alike. The imperfect is commonly used.
Etre excepted, these endings are put instead of the -ons ending from the first person plural of the present tense. There is no variation, that is to say: espérer, acheter, appeler are conjugated like any other -er verb.

Variations

In items 9 and 10 , note that the spelling changes before a.
It becomes ea in verbs ending in -ger: item 9 manger
and becomes ça in verbs ending in -cer: item 10 commencer.
The spelling changes so that the word sounds right (re-read the explanation in the vocabulary page of Cours 3 about the present of the verb rincer)

In item 10, note the double i in the verb rire in the first and second plural persons. A verb with a stem ending in -i keeps it in the imperfect. The conjugation is regular even if the result seems strange.

Uses

The imperfect tense may indicate that the action it describes was habitual or customary:
Item 1 nous allions à l'école à pied. Our parents could give us a ride sometimes but, often, we walked to school. With this meaning, the imperfect tense is very similar to the English forms: "would + verb" and "used to + verb".
The action, if not habitual, had a certain duration. That is the reason why the imperfect tense is used to describe what was happening rather than what happened:
Item 4: Il faisait des études de musique. Obviouly, to study music implies duration. That is the reason why the imperfect tense is used to describe the conditions in which the past action takes place. The imperfect tense builds a background.
We know that aller in the present tense + verb in infinitive expresses the immediate future. The immediate past is expressed by using venir (to come) in the imperfect tense + de + verb in infinitive:
Item 5 je venais de commencer la danse. It is the French equivalent of "to have just -ed".

The partitive article is an indefinite article that French uses before nouns of things that cannot be counted. It indicates an indefinite quantity of the thing the noun designs.
In item 10 Voulez-vous du gâteau means some cake, a piece of cake, but préférez-vous le gâteau au chocolat means the chocolate cake, you know which one.

Forms

In the singular, the partitive article has 3 forms:
du before a masculine word beginning with a consonant: boire du vin
de l' before a masculine or feminine word beginning with a vowel: boire de l'alcool, boire de l'eau
de la before a feminine word beginning with a consonant: boire de la bière
In the plural, the partitive article has 1 form:
des: boire des cafés, des orangeades et des limonades.

Variations

In the plural, des can be replaced by de when an adjective stands between the article and the noun:
Boire de bons coups,
but, except for fixed expressions, this variation sounds snobbish, particularly in spoken French, but also in written French. (Guy de Maupassant and Gérard de Nerval used des.) The article is d' if the adjective begins with a vowel.
Anyway, when an adjective is part of the noun, the article can't be de but des:
des jeunes filles, des petits pois.
In negative sentences, the singular partitive is de, whatever the gender of the noun.
Item 12: jamais de gâteau ni de glace.

What is the difference between the contracted article du (de+le) and the partitive article du?
There is no trace of a preposition in the partitive. As generally there is no article in English between "of" and an uncountable noun (a cup of tea, a piece of chalk, a cry of pain), English speaking people should have no difficulty to using the French partitive.

An adjective can be predicative:
item 1 quand j'étais petite
item 3 les récréations étaient communes.
In item 1 you see that petite qualifies je:
it is the only way for a pronoun to be qualified. You cannot build the phrase pronoun+adjective or adjective+pronoun.

An adjective becomes a noun by the addition of an article:
item 9 la classe des petites et des moyennes.
When the adjective is used as a noun, it can be subject: item 10 les grandes ne riaient pas
or object: Les parents regardent les petites.

Listen! In item 7: On n'apprenait and on apprenait sound alike because of the liaison that in French links the last consonant of a word to the first vowel of the following word. That is the reason why the second part of a negation (pas, rien, jamais) is so important.

Revision: in item 10 the negative structure ne...que means: only.

In item 1: et moi, in item 2: et toi: study how French uses the disjunctive pronoun to emphasize when English uses the subject pronoun.

In item 13, do not confuse the pronoun and the possessive adjective:
elle leur expliquait: them
que leur fille: their.

To play "she loves me she loves me not":
Elle m'aime (un) peu, beaucoup, passionnément, à la folie, pas du tout.
The adverbs expressing "how much" (that is to say the adverbs of degree) can be used alone:
Je l'aime beaucoup.
Some of them can receive a complement, sometimes with de:
elle a peu de chance, beaucoup de défauts, pas du tout d'humour et aucune qualité.

French began to be written with the Latin alphabet. The copists, and later the printers, to take into account sounds that did not exist in Latin, invented different codes. In example, a copist decided that the combination g+e before the vowels "a" and "o" would be set for the sound j. Then this copist or another, realized that this combination created a new problem: if g+a was pronounced: ga and g+e+a was pronounce ja, how could you differentiate ge and g(e)e? It was possible to keep the same system, and to add e between g and e to indicate that it must be pronounced j. Too easy! What about setting u between g and e? And so on.
When someone invented the letter j, hundreds of books already existed with g+e and g+u+e and many other brilliant brainwaves. That is the reason why " nous enjôlons nos geôliers" to drive pupils to despair.